Sprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart – and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler’s most famous pictures, on a constantly
There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare’s peculiar virtues and from the values
Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the ‘conquest’ of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the
translated by Krishna Winston The advantage of Crabwalk is that it is only a third as long as G
Norman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage – it’s hard to know
The story begins at the ch
There was recently, in the serious and excellent Saturday Guardian review, a short piece on Oor Wullie, a small boy whose cartoon adventures divert the readers of the Sunday Post in Scotland. It was written by Ian Jack, distinguished editor of Granta, the influential literary magazine. The article mentioned a number of things that touched
The pleasure boat captains who ply the coast of the Gulf of Salerno beneath Gore Vidal’s Ravello flat are inconsolable at the thought that the grand old man of American letters is returning to his homeland. The round trip that departs from Capri, and chugs past Positano and Amalfi, finishes with a flourish, as the
If this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the
How’s this for a good opening? ‘I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.’ If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn’t a novelist, he’s a nutcase. Let’s call him ‘J’. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her
In June 1959, A. L. Rowse was sitting on a train in the United States, writing up his journal. He was in the middle of describing an enjoyable encounter with Elizabeth Bowen in New York. Unfortunately, he was interrupted by a young woman asking if the seat beside him was vacant. Rowse indicated with his
One balmy summer afternoon in my final year at prep school, a group of my fellow-prefects and I gathered under the apple trees on the slope by the croquet lawn where only prefects were allowed, and reminisced about the five years we’d spent together. ‘Do you know, Delingpole,’ said one of them, ‘it was you
Religious tradition has defined human societies and shaped their habits of mind more strongly than any other factor. It still does, even in communities which have lost their collective belief in God. Indifference to formal creeds may be common to the governing elites of most countries, and in Europe to their electorates as well. Yet
In a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed ‘How I long for the bombs to start falling,’ Mark Steyn wrote, ‘This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone’s sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it
Who was Hannah More? William Cobbett called her an old bishop in petticoats, and she was the subject of a hefty, pious Victorian biography, since when she has been pretty much forgotten. The Edwardian wit Augustine Birrell buried 19 volumes of her collected works in his garden for compost. She owes her disinterment to the
The legendarily catastrophic life of Julian Maclaren-Ross has tempted biographers before. But the task of pursuing him, like the Hound of Heaven, through the sordid backstreets, rented basements and sodden saloon bars of his progress has always proved too much of a challenge. It is an extraordinary story of profligacy and waste which has been
In this chunky book, Joanna Pitman tells us something we already suspect to be true, and she does it beautifully. We are, she says, obsessed with blonde hair. For instance, even though only one in 20 of us is naturally blonde, a third of women lighten their hair. Why? Because blonde hair gets you more
This is the most old-fashioned new book I’ve read for a long time, something that I think Curtis Cate would regard as a compliment. In the Preface he writes, characteristically: Perhaps, indeed, the day is not too distant when, new post-modern norms having imposed themselves through a process of Nietzschean ‘transvaluation’, marriage (even between ‘heterosexuals’)
Translated by Theodosia Robertson Hot and silent, dusty and deserted, the town of Drohobycz seemed, during the few summer days I spent there some years ago, like a place forgotten in time. The houses had a certain faded, Austro-Hungarian glamour, but seemed to have been built for different people, in a different era. The central
The big idea behind this little book has been touted as ‘Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus’. That’s not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans